My Joy and my Bane

Sigh... i have just finished watching the anime Shuffle!
(yes i know i am super outdated on animes and only watch those many many years back)

And after each conclusion of an anime, i always feel a melancholic tinge of aftertaste. It happened to me too when i finished Mahoromatic, Shingetsutan Tsukihime, Kanon and even my all time favourite Vandread. I tend to get too attached to an anime i like that i am virtually submerged into it. So much so that i always have a reluctance to finish watching it. It is a sad excuse, but i don't want it to end.

Maybe that is why i am very reluctant to watch them in the first place. It takes months just to finish an anime, and Shuffle alone took me over 4 months. By that alone you can do the maths to calculate how much i actually watch per year. There are exceptions though like Tsukihime which caught me in suspence until i spent a marathon of 6 hours to clear it and felt really down in the pits after that.

Dwelling onto the topic of being too attached to anime, i think i am slightly abnormal. The word 'otaku' might or might not apply to me. When i watch a series, take for example Kanon, i shed bucketfull of tears to the extent i really 'FEEL' the anime. Eversince young when i watch any show, no matter how i told myself that it is all just fabrication, i still tend to feel deep emotions that are conveyed in them. As if it was a very real thing and i was a character in there, feeling everything myself.

Which is another possible explanation as well as to why i watch so little anime. I will drink in every single detail possible and rewind the show over and over again. I want to know every single meaning of the words said, every action taken and etc. I have a criteria as well when watching, which is to have no external disturbances if possible so i can concentrate. This is like a meditative state i enter. Thus this dooms myself to usually wanting to watch animes alone.

Exceptions are for those comedic ones like Lucky Star and Seto no Hanayome to name a few. THAT i can watch non-stop and with other audiences because i feel less of that emotional thingy compared to the other genres. Still, the end of a comedy series brings slight of whatever i mentioned above about that melancholic tinge. No escape.

So why torture myself and watch in the first place if i were to always feel sad about a series ending? - because i just love watching it too much to completely ignore it. I try to watch as little as i can to lessen that problem but that just gives me another problem. I am superbly outdated and i feel that in the field i am dwelling in, i can't let this go on forever as i constantly need to update myself.

Joy and sadness. Both in one bundle. What more could i ask for.